By Andy Burrows

You’re a Finance professional who wants to do their best for the business you work for.

You may want to rise to be a CFO one day.

If so, you must grasp business performance management.

Business performance management is a key element of the business acumen you need to be a business-focused Finance professional. And it’s something that is specifically the responsibility of the CFO and Finance.

If you want to be more than “just an accountant”; if you want to drive business performance, rather than just spectate or commentate on it, learn business performance management!

And that’s what I aim to introduce you to in this article.

Why is business performance management so important?

Business performance management is an essential discipline, because as I regularly say, “managing business performance better leads to better business performance... otherwise why bother managing it?”

Management is “maintaining control over” something. In this case we want to maintain co...

By Andy Burrows

What is business acumen?

Business acumen is an extremely important topic for Finance professionals.

Everyone agrees that you need business acumen to be a good CFO. It’s also an essential ingredient for a Finance Business Partner. But, on top of that, we know that Finance as a whole is becoming more business-focused, so business acumen is becoming more fundamental to Finance professional development.

And there are a couple of reasons, at least, for the rising importance of business acumen for Finance professionals.

First, the business landscape is increasingly complex, changing rapidly, and becoming more global, because of the unstoppable drive of new digital and communications technology.

That means that the analytical part of decision-making now needs more than just a commercial CFO. The CFO needs a team they can delegate to, to get involved in helping business decisions.

It has also put non-Finance managers in the business under pressure. They are also being as...

By Andy Burrows

Those who have followed me for a while may have noticed that I’ve started using the term business-focused Finance. And you may be wondering whether it’s actually just the same as Finance business partnering. Or is business-focused Finance something different?

And to answer that question right up front I’d say that a large element of Business-Focused Finance is Finance business partnering, but I’m thinking of business-focused Finance as something broader.

What I've come to understand is that Finance Business Partner is a specific role often seen within Finance, designed to give various non-Finance functions access to the full power of the Finance function in managing business performance within their areas.

Finance business partnering is a phrase that’s either been used to describe simply what Finance Business Partners do, or to describe the kind of mindset needed within Finance.

I think that’s confusing.

It tends to lead to the misconception that having Finance Bu...

By Andy Burrows

Do you want to be awesome in your work in Finance?

Perhaps you roll your eyes cynically? Perhaps ‘awesome’ seems to be a bit over-the-top?

I mean, ok, so you’d rather be ‘a little bit good’, ‘in the upper quartile’ or ‘showing signs of improvement’? Yawn...

Well, whatever you think of this article, I hope you’ll come away picturing what a Finance team would be like to work in if it was really [insert your own favoured superlative].

And when you’re thinking about Finance transformation, that picture could form the basis for the vision. That’s what you want to transform into. When you close your eyes and visualise an awesome Finance team, you don’t normally visualise a brand new shiny SAP instance or an offshore service centre. So, what do you visualise?

A new paradigm for working in Finance

Anyway, this article is really all about defining the new paradigm for working in Finance.

A paradigm is really a way of looking at something. Paradigms can help if they’re ac...